Why we think immigrants steal jobs, increase crime

In this image taken from video, Javier Garrido Martinez, left and Alan Garcia, right, sit with their 4-year-sons at a news conference in New York, Wednesday, July 11, 2018. They men were reunited with their children after almost two months of separation, Authorities took their boys them when they stopped at the U.S. southern border.

Photo: Robert Bumsted / Associated Press

The Trump administration repeatedly makes two claims to justify its crackdown on immigrants and their families: Immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans; and immigrants cause increases in crime. Both of these statements are widely accepted in our country. U.S. Gallup polls indicate about twice as many people believe immigrants take away job opportunities as believe that they improve them. About five times as many people believe that immigrants make the crime situation worse. Both of these statements are myths.

Why do we believe that immigrants cause damage to our economy and our social fabric when careful investigation consistently reveals the opposite? The reason may lie in some psychological tricks that we play on ourselves.

Decades of data contradict the idea that immigrants create unemployment and lower wages for American laborers. One of the most relevant and compelling new studies appears in the current issue of the American Economic Review. The research studies effects from the termination of a guest-worker program that operated for two decades. Beginning in 1942, the Bracero program provided legal permits for nearly 500,000 Mexican workers to enter the United States for low-wage work, primarily in agriculture. The Johnson administration, believing that the program reduced domestic employment and wages, canceled it in 1964.

Spotlight on immigration

What the study finds, however, is that removing a half-million Mexican workers from the U.S. labor force yielded no improvement in U.S. employment or wages. Farms simply began to substitute more machine-intensive methods for the missing labor. Furthermore, any time workers leave an area, gains in employment for remaining workers taking these jobs is typically offset by the reduced demand for goods and services at local businesses.

Overall, immigration studies consistently show the net economic effect of migrants into communities is either negligible or slightly positive. The abrupt cancellation of the Bracero program provides insight into what the effects from the current immigrant crackdown are likely to be in the labor market: roughly zero.

A second myth is that immigrants increase crime rates. This belief is not new; in the early 20th century, Americans also believed that the new European immigrants were disproportionally prone to crime, a historical claim that has been debunked by recent research. Moreover, a National Academy of Sciences report recently concluded that virtually every academic study carried out over the past century on the question finds that crime rates have been substantially lower among immigrants than nonimmigrants in the United States.

The lower crime rates found among America’s immigrant community hold across ethnicity and language group. Despite President Trump’s focus on MS-13 and other gangs from Central America and Mexico, a 2015 study by researchers at UC Irvine concludes from U.S. Census data that “less educated native-born men age 18-39 had an incarceration rate of 10.7 percent — more than triple the 2.8 percent rate among foreign-born Mexican men, and five times greater than the 1.7 percent rate among foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men.”

Behavioral economics is beginning to understand that behind myths like these are psychological tricks related to the way we perceive our world.

The first of these psychological tricks is “confirmation bias.” Research has shown that we tend to accept data that confirms our prior-held beliefs, but reject data that conflicts with them. We also tend to search for information in places that are likely to validate our strongest beliefs. If you are suspicious of immigrants, you will subconsciously look for (and subsequently accept) information that confirms your inward suspicions — a rather scary thought.

Another of these tricks is “salience bias.” Jobs produced from immigration are less noticeable than job losses from immigrant competition. It is easy to identify an immigrant holding a job formerly held by a native-born worker, but it is hard to identify the hundreds of jobs created from the influx of immigrants into an area, or identify the jobs created by innovative immigrant entrepreneurs. The heinous felony committed by an immigrant makes the front page; that immigrants have low average crime rates unfortunately does not.

There are better ways to deal with widening economic disparities than draconian treatment of refugees and immigrants. The most important involve increasing economic opportunities for Americans negatively impacted by globalization and technological change. These include subsidizing vocational training, increasing scholarship opportunities for lower-income Americans, and increasing competitiveness in U.S. manufacturing. These will be more effective at making America great again than an immigration policy guided and perpetuated by myths.

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics and international studies at the University of San Francisco and research affiliate at the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.